Architecture Within Reach

West Harlem Piers Park

West Harlem Piers Park

W Architecture And Landscape Architecture, 2009 Hudson River Greenway, between West 125th and West 135th Streets 1 to 125th Street

When Barbara Wilks’s firm W Architecture and Landscape Architecture prepared the 2002 West Harlem Master Plan for the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the ten-block section of the Hudson River waterfront north of 125th Street was a gap in an otherwise unbroken strip of public open space stretching from one tip of Manhattan to the other. The site—a Borden Milk Factory many decades before and more recently a parking lot popular with prostitutes and crack addicts—was seen as an important element in the area’s redevelopment, and it became the first stage in the implementation of the master plan. Its design as a park was viewed as a way to knit the waterfront public spaces together and attract people from and to the adjacent 125th Street shopping district. It is also close to Columbia University’s planned Manhattanville expansion.

As executed, the narrow park features two new piers in the form of a broken diagonal that appears to peel away from the island; these provide access for fishing, boat excursions, and kayak launches, as well as a venue for permanent artwork by Nari Ward. The “inland” portion of the park includes planted areas, walkways, a bike path, and play fountains, with benches made from the old granite bulkheads scattered about “as if left by waves.”1 It is an extremely popular public space, overshadowed by the opening of the High Line (54) the same summer, but just as important to the community it serves.

Toren

Toren

In 2004 the Department of City Planning approved the Downtown Brooklyn Redevelopment Plan to add office space and mixed residential uses to the area by rezoning over twenty blocks in the borough’s core. The area just east of Flatbush Avenue was pegged for residential development, and a number of condo towers followed. Easily the most eye-catching addition is the BFC Partners–developed Toren (Dutch for “tower”) on a triangular site east of MetroTech. SOM’s façade design for the 240-unit, thirty-eight-story tower utilizes two types of glass (clear and tinted) interspersed with dimpled light-gray aluminum panels in irregular vertical stripes. The overall effect is a supergraphic of light splotches wrapping the corners of a dark slab. Covering the podium is the same dark glass and metal, undulating in and out to create one of the fanciest parking garages in recent years.